Pilchard Kedgeree

It's been many months since I last ate some rice. I'm fit, healthy and very active. Tomorrow is my second fencing class of the week, which is a tough, gruelling few hours of forced footwork, then sparring. Very tough on the legs, full of mind/body interaction and changing course on the fly inside a split second. In fact, several actions can take place inside a second!

I seem to work well with a good carb-up in the middle of the day for the evening lesson, so as a break from sweet/potatoes, I thought I'd have a dish of rice.

If white rice is not for you, please do carry on with cauliflower rice.

Kedgeree is one of those totally fake exotic dishes. It is damn tasty, though!

So, boil, then simmer some rice with a few other ingredients: carrot cubes, maybe peas, green beans, chilli, turmeric, coriander, bouillon, that kind of thing. You want a nice savoury rice. If you're doing it with cauliflower, steam and crush your cauli, then fold it into the other ingredients in some fat in a skillet.

Serve out into a bowl.

This is my lunch, so to be eaten cold ... allow the rice to cool, or carry of if you want it hot.

Open a can of pilchards. These are cheap fish! Herrings, I believe, but Atlantic, or something like that. Canned fish like this is pretty low brow, but we have no pretentions.

Drop a few fish bodies over your rice and interspace with boiled eggs and garnished with some 'erbs.

Even bait can be tasty, eh Peril ... I mean ... just look at what the zoos feed to lions.

I have a serious preference for cheaper meats, cheaper cuts, cheaper fish ... the unpopular is generally unpopular because it requires more cooking, it might be stronger flavoured or just fattier. Suits me fine! As above, we have a kind of frugal tradition in the UK for canned fish on bread as a cheap meal. I usually buy fresh, but saw a can and really fancied doing something with it.

On a side note, I wonder just how good canned fish is given that it is super-heated to cook through and then canned. That super-heating surely does something quite bad to the fats. Is there a nutritionalist who can give us some insight? On the back of that, canned fish gives us a cheap real food, even if it is the poor relation.